Ticket to Heaven

October 31, 2014

Which involves a queue

Dear little friends,

Every country has a smell, have you noticed? Myanmar smells like mold and dust and the sharp smell of betel nut spit. Even as the plane was landing the dry airplane air was displaced with the moist Burmese smell that immediately coughed up memories of this country I love so much. It also lurched me into that kind of sick/thrilled combination of jet lag and the culture shock of stepping out into a place that couldn't be any more different from our home in Portland. Well, okay, it's probably more different in Antarctica or the bottom of the ocean, but you know, it's not far behind.

Immigration was unbelievably slow, but the next morning we realized that since we were in line until after midnight, we actually had an extra day to stay in Myanmar so good on us! Underemployment is a big problem in Burma, as is their education system, so there often seem to be a lot of folks sitting around watching other people work slowly and not solving simple logistical problems that would speed things up. That was the case at the airport. We stood in long lines, craning our necks to see if our baggage had arrived and was it about to be carried out by somebody else. But surely there was somebody checking baggage claims, right? It was time for us to take the chill pill and remember The Burmese Way, which more often than not is not The Way We Do Things. Still and all, the boxes and bags were there, only slightly worse for wear.

We stuffed into a typical elderly Toyota Corolla station wagon with no seat belts and a right-hand steering wheel even though they drive on the right in Burma. Think about that one for a second. Fortunately it was now the wee hours and this is not a huge nightlife city, although the driver did point out a discotheque he thought we might enjoy. We were sharing the taxi with another traveler and at his hotel the night guy came out and did an exaggerated arm-waving "bringing in the plane" maneuver which had a lot of panache and verve and got us all laughing.

Our guesthouse was off of an alley, up on the second floor, and the driver and Bruce went in first while I leaned on the hood of the car in the very dark street. This is not something I would be doing in a low-income neighborhood in Portland at 1:30 am, but here I felt perfectly relaxed. There was a stray dog nosing around some trash, and a little boy and his dad were picking up recycling in their wooden wagon. A woman sat with her wares under a fluorescent bulb on the opposite corner. The air was still but there was lightning off in the distance glowing off and on over the buildings that had no lights in their windows. Electricity is an intermittent commodity in Yangon and only hotels and swank businesses keep their generators going all night, every night. But even though it was dark and strange, there was nothing to worry about, and the luxury of that is not something I take for granted. To feel elation when you could just feel fear is a remarkable and valuable thing.

Our room here in Yangon is, shall we say, modest. We have stayed in a lot of modest places, and this was by far not the worst. The water is turned off at night so that was perplexing, and it didn't have a window, but we did enjoy the colored light fixture that slowly cycles through red and blue and yellow and green. We brushed our teeth with bottled water and fell into bed and that was it. The next morning, the darkness and trash piles in the alleyway were gone, replaced by piles of flowers and fruit, women carrying things on their heads, teahouse boys buzzing around the teahouse across the alley, and the sun shining down on it all.

A morning market outside of our guesthouse.

Young boys and girls work for room and board in teahouses all over Myanmar.

The national pastime, watching televised soccer at the teahouse.

For the first time in many trips to Myanmar, there is internet access unscrutinized by government busybodies, free wifi in even a modest place like ours, and we could Facetime with my daughter. We pointed the iPad out the window so she could see the scene outside, and at the lobby counter where the owner and two hotel boys waved at her, the young woman who had pulled her car over in the rainy darkness of an Oregon evening in late October to see a glimpse of where we were. It may take many days here before these new communication possibilities become ordinary to us, and all of the other changes in Burma since we were last here.

But the main things stay the same. Women are still wearing their colorful longyi skirts, and putting flowers in their hair and thanaka paste on their faces. Walking the streets today was like being at a colorful festival. I am ordinarily pretty shy, yet just taking a second or two to look people in the eye and smile will bring a return smile 85% of the time. There are a lot of cool sights to see in Myanmar and each one is worth seeing but the main attraction has always been its people, and there is no sign that any of their charm and individuality has diminished since we were last here and I lift my tiny milky cup of Burmese tea to that staying the same forever.

The beige paste on this woman's face is called thanaka, and is worn as a sunscreen and skin conditioner all over Burma. Often it is applied in fun patterns and shapes.

Sewing up a longyi (sarong) in the market.

After a couple of days we had to move to a new guesthouse because bookings in Yangon are so tight. Our bikes patiently wait in their boxes, which are stored at the first guesthouse. We have spent a lot of time walking around and do not feel at all comfortable with riding in the part of town we are staying in, the traffic is at least quadruple what it was in 2008. We have done a few errands, changing money, buying a sim card, which is particularly astonishing since the last time we were here there were simply no cell phones, they cost thousands of dollars and coverage was minimal and slow. Most people used the "government phone stations", which were little tables on each block with a bunch of land line phones that people rented. The table owner would send a runner to your apartment if you had a call. The little tables still exist but you can buy a basic phone for 10,000 kyat and a sim card for 1500 kyat. The exchange rate is handily simple, 1000 kyat to the dollar. Everywhere you see people who probably own only one pair of flip-flops texting and talking.

The other big change is banking, we were able to go to a real bank and change money. Last time you gave your crisp dollars to the hotel manager or gold seller who disappeared to the back room and returned with your kyat. Now there are ATMs everywhere, even at the famous Shwedagon Pagoda.

Some things change, some lag behind. It took us 2 hours to arrange a train ticket to Bagan. We are taking an "Upper class sleeper" night train there, I'm sure "upper class" will all be relative but it promises to be a real adventure, if the ticketing process is any judge. After failing to find the booking office because it looked like an livestock auction yard we stepped into an air-conditioned travel agent's office who pointed us back to the rusty gates and sleeping shirtless agents behind Burmese signage. There was no electricity. The near vicinity of the booking office is apparently full of homeless folks living behind the sheltering walls and amongst the swampy trash-filled jungles of the old train yard. It looks like there should be ominous music to warn you of danger and mayhem but actually it's just the sad scene of extreme urban poverty, and the sleeping dog we step over is not about to bite anybody.

We were directed to the Bagan ticket master and told him we had boxes and he sent us to the train station a half-mile away to ask the stationmaster if that was okay. The station looked like what you would expect, and I sincerely hope that a period-piece documentarian uses it for their location on either their post-apocalyptic or late British empire period piece before the developers move in. The man we talked to was sitting in a gloomy office thumbing through carbon ticket piles. He said each passenger could stow one box. We did a lively impression with gestures and grunting of the size and weight of our boxes and he enjoyed that but we don't know if he was actually the guy in charge, if he knew what he was talking about, if he had actually given us permission, or what. We decided to assume these were all big enthusiastic yeses, so back to the cattle yard where a woman had climbed up onto the repurposed benches made of old rusty train track pieces and fallen asleep. Mr. Ticket wrote a short novel on triplicate carbon paper and stamped and creased and so forth and after 15 minutes of this we had our ticket. You watch somebody doing this and you try to superimpose some vision of the present over this Dickensian scene, with a machine that spits out your boarding pass and a guy in his company polo shirt playing with his iPhone under warmish LED lighting before curtly nodding you off to your destination.

Mr.Ticket handed us the ticket and explained everything in detail to us, smiled, took our 33,000 kyat with his right hand, left hand delicately touching the right forearm in the traditional gesture of respect, and we walked away. Half of our day was gone. We had literally walked miles on crumbling sewer block sidewalks to get this ticket. This called for a trip to the Shwedagon.

We grabbed a taxi and sat in traffic for 30 minutes as our driver's car stalled, got restarted, stalled again. After climbing the long flight of steps in our bare feet thunderstorms rolled in and we leaned on a table under a shelter and watched the rainy scene. We stayed for nearly four hours, as the rain stopped, the sun set, the devotees prayed, couples and families circumambulated, foreign tourists like us only mostly in very large tour groups took photos and sweated, also like us. The Shwedagon Pagoda is the holiest place in a country riddled with temples and pagodas, the St. Peter's of Myanmar. It's glittery and gold-caked with gorgeous wooden tracery and a massive marble floor surrounding it. But this is still Myanmar, and it wouldn't be Myanmar without the frisson of a beautifully dissonant funk. The gigantic gold-leaf stupa is covered with more reparative scaffolding than a Burning Man sculpture, inhabited by hundreds of crows that periodically take wing in an intricate murmuration. A man prays, supplicates, and texts all at the same time. An elder monk stops the red-faced tourist who photographed a beautiful child and asks her nicely to show the child her own photo, whose delight makes everybody nearby smile and nod approvingly. It is still a place beloved and it was a pleasure to park our foreign sweaty bodies on the marble floor, take photos, and watch it all go by.

A sidewalk shrine attached to a banyan tree.

At the east entrance of Shwedagon Pagoda, this little girl is selling birds to be released for merit.

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